Robotics: First robotics engineering school to publicly announce that its goal is to eliminate all...

...menial and repetitive labor jobs; to train robotic service technicians, programmers, designers, and scientists; and to advance robotics engineering. The school must offer at least one associate degree for robotic service technicians and its bachelor degree in robotics engineering must build upon its associate degree to include computer programming of robots (to fix programming problems of robots). Its master's degree must build upon its bachelor degree to include the automation of at least one menial or repetitive labor job (peer reviewed and adopted by at least 10 businesses and/or government agencies which have at least 100 such automatable jobs). Its doctorate degree builds upon its master's degree to include advancing the general field of robotics engineering in some significant way (its research being published in a respected science/engineering journal [first, second, or third tier journal] and/or it is the foundation for a revenue-earning patent [patent must be earning significant royalties before degree is awarded]).

[Luddites wail that robots are taking jobs away from humans ... and they're right. However, that's a good thing. Very few people actually want to do menial or repetitive labor jobs. Where Luddites are wrong is that they want the progress of robots stopped. That's both unrealistic and bad for society. What society needs to do is to realize that the more the robots do these menial and repetitive labor jobs, the more jobs will be created to service and develop such robots. These servicing and developing jobs would be where humans can come into the equation and get gainful employment. And for industrialized countries like the USA, that means more manufacturing jobs RETURNING to their country as robots can out-compete low-wage third-world countries. They can out-compete by saving on labor costs, transportation costs (no trans-oceanic shipping required), and having access to a much larger pool of robotics engineers, service technicians, programmers, and designers.]

Future Challenges:

1) First robotics engineering school to publicly commit themselves to taking on and achieving all of the Better Tomorrow Challenges involving robots. To win this future challenge, Jack Decker must attend the press conference and the school must at least require those getting a master's degree from their school to accomplish one of BTC's robotics challenges to get their degree. [Naturally, once all of BTC's robotics challenges have been accomplished, this requirement will no longer be in force for their masters students. However, expect this to be a moving target as Jack Decker will likely be constantly adding new robotics challenges to BTC as time goes on.]

2) The first robotics engineering association (e.g., IEEE Robotics and Automation Society) to hold an annual competition of robotics engineering students over the summer where teams from different robotics engineering schools compete against each other to automate menial and repetitive labor jobs. The competition being a single-elimination tournament where two teams are pitted against each other and the winner moving onto the next round of the competition. The two competing teams given one week to automate a randomly assigned menial and/or repetitive labor job and the one that does the best job of doing so winning that heat. This competition must have at least sixteen competing robotics engineering schools and be held over four weeks during the summer. The location of the annual competition rotating among the participating schools each year.

3) First TV documentary to chronicle Future Challenge #2. To win this future challenge, the documentary must air on at least one US broadcast or cable TV network during its prime time. It doesn't have to premiere on a US broadcast or cable TV network though.

4) First weekly TV show that covers FC #2. To win this future challenge, the TV show must air on a US broadcast or cable TV network during its prime time. However, it can premiere on another country's broadcast or cable TV network first. [This show could be very much like Scrapheap Challenges (known as Junkyard Wars in the USA) but different in that it actually tries to help advance society by trying to really automate real-world menial and/or repetitive labor jobs.] To win this future challenge, the TV show must air for at least four seasons.

Discussion:
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